David Fincher'sThe Social Network will premier at New York Film Festival next month, the early reception the Film is receiving has been overtly positive. One place thats not a source of praise for the Film is the company on which the Film is actually based. Facebook executives have seen the Movie & they are not to happy -claiming it is full of fabrications.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg himselfrecently declaredthat the film and the book,Accidental Billionaires, on which the Film is based on are “fiction.” The New York Times records the story about the tensions between the filmmakers and company executives. According to the article, which seems largely based on interviews with The Social Network producer Scott Rudin, Facebook lobbied for substantial changes to the script that were never made:

Mr. Rudin described months of backdoor contacts during which he tried to ease relations with Mr. Zuckerberg by letting colleagues of the Facebook chief read the script, and even by accommodating them with small changes. Facebook had insisted on bigger changes, which the producers declined to make. In the end, Mr. Rudin said, “We made exactly the movie we wanted to make.”

The film is also sprinkled with scenes of extravagant parties, and it is not clear how authentic they are. As of this week, Mr. Rudin said, one remaining question was to what extent the finished film would include a scene that depicted Sean Parker, the Napster co-founder who was heavily involved with Facebook’s early history, delivering his dialogue while a pair of teenage girls offer partygoers lines of cocaine from bared breasts…Mr. Rudin said his main concern about the scene involved how much could be shown without compromising the movie’s hoped-for PG-13 rating.

One of the sources of controversy originates from book on which the film is based. Ben Mezrich’s Accidental Billionaires has already been shown to be highly inaccurate. Mezrich evidently played up or outright invented many of the “sexy” elements of the book, and even exaggerated Zuckerberg’s basic impetus to start the site. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes stated:

"It’s crazy because all of a sudden Mark becomes this person who created Facebook to get girls or to gain power. That’s not what was going on. It was a little more boring and quotidian than that"

Finally, Mark Zuckerberg expresses his apprehension about the film in a recent interview:

"Honestly, I wish that when people try to do journalism or write stuff about Facebook that they at least try to get it right. The movie is fiction"

For his part, Mezrich has already made his argument for why he portrayed Zuckerberg in this way, saying, “The impetus of everything in college, I think, is to get laid…I know that was my whole purpose in becoming a writer. I think that in general that’s why everybody does everything.”

None of this really sways my faith in Fincher’s ability to craft a gripping story, The Social Network sounds like it will be drawing its facts from one long game of movie “telephone.” Thus far, the company’s strategy towards the film has been to just ignore it. But can it continue to do so for a film that promises to so effectively capture the cultural zeitgeist?